Black, perfect black. Not the fake, almost-black-but-kinda-gray black. Real black. That’s what I feel inside of me all the time. There is no light, just the absence of it. There is no color, no warmth, just dark, cold, solid blackness that grows bit by bit each day. It started as a numbness in my fingers, right at the very tips. After a while it started to tingle, like when your leg falls asleep. The tingling spread through the rest of my hands and up my arms. Then the tingle disappeared. Or maybe it’s still there, but I went from recognizing that dull ache of numbness to feeling nothing at all. Just the absence of it.

Whenever I feel the tingle, I know I’m about to lose more of myself to the dark. But when the nothingness got to my memory, it took over even quicker there than anywhere else. The tingle never came. All I can remember is the black. I know there must have been a time before it. A time of color and warmth. There must have been. Right?

People I vaguely recognize try to talk to me sometimes, or rather they talk at me, because I don’t really hear them. My hearing is on its way out. They give up soon enough because they figure I’m ignoring them, but the truth is that I don’t know how to tell them I don’t understand their attempts. I stopped speaking a long time ago. I don’t remember my last words.

On the days when I manage to do more than count the ringlets in the wooden coffee table, I dig out the same lighter I’ve had in a junk drawer since a one-night-stand left it here two years ago, and I experiment with the flame. I’m slowly turning the mahogany finish to a charred ebony color, and I hold my hand far too close to the flame than is normally safe.

I wish I could feel it, but it won’t be long before the black diminishes my hope, too. Then I won’t wish anymore. I’ll just be.

I’ll just be the black. I’ll just be the nothing.

We lie together like this, entwined in this much-too-small bed, until the pastels on the wall become icy shades of blue. Your gaze falls heavy and out of focus, your breathing reduced to an occasional auditory escape from your lips, subconsciously fighting to remind me that I am not alone. These are the only times that I do not fear the shadows. With the dark comes the dead and the still, the world motionless save for the beating of our hearts and the rush of blood through our veins. Only your arms and this blanket keeping the cold of the night at bay, and the broken hearts of years past safely out of reach.